A Brief History of the Internet Internet Research A Brief History of the Internet

I. History of the Internet The origins of the Internet influence its structure today, from URLs to www. Understanding the roots of the Internet is essential for understanding how computers store and retrieve information.

Military and academic roots The Internet has military and academic roots. In the 1960s, the Department of the Defense funded experimental computer networks at universities so government and academic researchers could more easily share computer files.

Decentralization The military did not want a few centralized computers (that might be knocked out in a war). There was a need for a network of computers that could communicate with each other.

Protocol Each computer on the network became a server and was assigned its own numerical Internet Protocol address (such as 133.456.77.1). Internet Protocol is the language used by computers to communicate. By the late 1960s, researchers around the world communicated over this network.

Network of networks In the late 1980s, supercomputers were established. Thousands of researchers in universities and government agencies were connected. Regional networks were established and connected. Companies and non-profit organizations asked to be connected.

The World Wide Web In the early 1990s, Tim Berners Lee created a protocol that could “link” information residing on different computers. The collection of linked computers is called the World Wide Web, an essential part of the Internet. Tim Berners Lee is the true “father” of the World Wide Web.

Mosaic: The first browser Not long after, also in the early 1990s, University of Illinois researchers and students, including student Marc Andreesen, developed an exciting way to access – or browse – the Web. The graphical interface, called Mosaic, allowed people to click on text, buttons and icons to move around the Web. Andreesen went on to help create Netscape, which created the browser Netscape Navigator.

Netscape and Explorer For awhile, Netscape was the dominant browser with 90 percent of the market. Microsoft saw the incredible success of the Web and began offering the browser Internet Explorer. Given away free by Microsoft, Explorer eventually became the most used browser. With browsers, use of the World Wide Web exploded. Millions of Web sites were created. Millions of people went online.

The rise of the Web The explosion of Web sites has been spectacular. Remember, all this only started happening in the early 1990s. In 1993, less than 1,000 Web pages could be found. Today, the number may be close to a billion.